: Health First, Inc. will lead a community-wide strategic planning process to explore the feasibility of implementing a web-based standardized patient care plan to provide point of care access to patient information across the acute and long-term care continuum of systems and services leading to improved operational efficiency and patient safety. A logic model format will be employed to support planning design, implementation, analysis, and knowledge dissemination. The project planning team will include representatives from acute care hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, and community based service agencies including patients, physicians, nurses, ancillary services staff, and information technology staff. Individual planning team members will be chosen based on their knowledge, expertise, resources, capacity, enterprise visibility and integrity, and ability to impact on the long-term care delivery system and will include experts in patient safety, integrated systems design, data analysis and evaluation, and strategic planning. Clinical and organizational needs and system capacity and resources will be identified, opportunities and barriers analyzed, and project parameters defined. The process will result in a fully developed implementation plan to lay out the sequence of steps, resources, and the timeline necessary to bring about measurable and sustainable systematic changes that improve patient safety using health information technology.
